By ROBERT GEARTY, ALICE McQUILLAN,
JOHN MARZULLI and DAVE GOLDINER
Cops say John Fenrich had a terrible secret.
Enraged by his stepson's homosexuality, the Long Island father is suspected of dismembering the teenager, burning the skin off the head with acid and scrawling racist and anti-gay epithets on the bleached skull, police sources said.
After the remains were found Tuesday — and after the trail of clues began to point to Fenrich — the 36-year-old clambered atop his Dix Hills home with two guns early yesterday, firing a few rounds and keeping cops at bay for eight hours before killing himself.
"I'm a failure as a father," Fenrich yelled at cops before firing a bullet into his head. "Shoot me, shoot me. What are you waiting for?"
In plot line out of a dark, twisted thriller, Fenrich's life started unraveling 20 hours earlier and 50 miles west, when a man taking a walk in Alley Pond Park in Bayside, Queens, found a big blue plastic tub, police sources said.
The man opened the tub and found the acid-burned skull, a foot bone with flesh on it and other crushed body parts. He took the tub with its grisly contents to stunned Emergency Service Unit cops who happened to be parked nearby, the sources said.
The skull was scrawled with a Social Security number and a racist and anti-gay slur, according to the sources. Police initially suspected the grim find might be the result of an occult killing because the Social Security number included "666."
Investigators later traced the number to Steen Fenrich, 19, a popular Half Hollow Hills High School graduate who entered the Army in July 1997 and served nine months before being discharged. He had left his parents' Dix Hills home last fall.
The bones had not been positively identified last night, police said, and the acid damaged the enamel of the victim's teeth, preventing a dental match. Still, cops have little doubt they are Steen Fenrich's remains, the sources said.
When detectives told John Fenrich late Tuesday night that they had found Steen's body, he pointed the finger at his stepson's gay lover, saying the two "had a fight," a source said.
But both the boyfriend and one of Steen Fenrich's best friends told police they should look at the father, police said.
At 5 a.m., John Fenrich, who was white, called a producer at a Long Island cable television station and threatened to kill his wife, Wanda, who is black, and their other son, John David, 15, police said.
Cops had suspected Fenrich was his stepson's killer, and not just a grief-stricken parent, because he knew undisclosed details about the grisly discovery.
He told the TV producer that his stepson had been found "all chopped up" — but NYPD detectives never told him the body had been dismembered, police sources said.
As cops pulled up to the brown-shingled split-level home, Fenrich scrambled up to the roof waving a rifle and a handgun.
As his wife and son escaped, Fenrich fired in the air several times and kept the neighborhood hostage for hours, police said.
Arman Shagholami raced home after hearing about the standoff just three doors from his home.
"It's a very quiet neighborhood. Nothing like this ever happens," said Shagholami, whose family had left before the shooting started.
Cops believe John Fenrich killed Steen Fenrich — the biracial son of his wife — in a homophobic rage, possibly several weeks ago, according to sources.
Investigators theorized Fenrich, after storing the body parts, dumped them in the park recently to point cops to his stepson's gay lover, the sources said. The stepson and his lover had lived nearby.
Gay activists said the killing was a hate crime, even if it was within a family.
"People think bias crimes happen to strangers," said Carl Locke of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. "But a father can also kill a son because he is queer. It happens more often than people want to believe."
Fenrich also had been accused of being a scam artist. Along with his wife, he was awaiting trial on insurance fraud charges stemming from 17 allegedly staged car accidents.
Both of his brothers are with the NYPD, one a detective and one a sergeant. The sergeant went to the shooting scene yesterday to try to negotiate his brother's surrender.
Daily News Staff Writers
